Pitts: Malala Yousafzai fought for truth

Usually, the fact that we are barricaded on both sides by great bodies of water gives us in this country a certain sense of remove from the awful things people with funny names do to one another in strange places on the far side of the globe. But once in awhile, the thing is awful enough that you can’t ignore it, or pretend that it is less real.

Such is the case with Malala Yousafzai, the 14-year-old Pakistani girl whose shooting last week on a school bus in the Swat Valley sparked headlines and outrage here and around the world. Yousafzai, who at this writing is in critical condition after emergency surgery, has been an Internet activist, agitating for women’s access to education

The Taliban considers that a capital crime. It claimed responsibility for the men who stopped the bus and boarded it, who asked for Malala by name and, when she was identified, shot her and fled. It says her death is required under Islamic law.

But make no mistake: Islam is not their religion. It is their excuse.

The outspoken child in America is not in particular danger of physical violence from religious or ideological zealots. But the abortion doctor is. The gay couple is. The Muslim-American is.

Fundamentalism is fundamentalism wherever it breeds, always the same dark stain of unbending literalism, always the same shrill claim that it guards the one true path to enlightenment, always the same crazed insistence that the one unforgivable crime against faith, the one inexcusable heresy of ideology, is to ask questions.

But where there are no questions, there can be no true answers. And where there is not freedom, there cannot be real faith. How real can faith be if it is not a thing freely held, if it is something required, coerced, enforced?

This is something fundamentalists never understand. They think people can be intimidated or mandated into silence. They think people can be shot or bombed into obedience.

For a while, they can.

But the great man was right: truth crushed to earth will rise again. And he was right, too, when, in the same speech, he quoted the abolitionist Theodore Parker: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”

So eventually and inevitably, there will always be someone who can neither bend, nor pretend, someone compelled by conscience — and yes, sometimes, faith — to stand and resist. There will always be a Rosa Parks refusing to give up her seat in Alabama, a Paul Rusesabagina sheltering people from massacre in Rwanda, an Oskar Schindler hiding Jews from the Nazis in Poland, a nameless man standing before a tank in Tiananmen Square. And a Malala Yousafzai defying the Taliban in Pakistan.

In taking their lonely stands, these people birth myths and memories that make us braver than we actually are, or would otherwise be. So the irony here is almost poetic. The Taliban was so threatened by the words of a little girl that they tried to kill her.